Anyone looking at the news in January and February 2008 will see reports such as "Morgan Stanley plans NJ data center" and "Construction underway on HSBC data center" "T-Mobile signs up to new data center"; "Lithuania googled for data center" and "IBM and EU fund examination of the direction of cloud computing" Already the trends of the year were clear with offerings promising to cut data center power consumption and monitoring and measuring clearly becoming a major trend. Continued large data center investments were announced while industry consolidation started early in the year.

January 2008: Technology: Networking firms Cisco and Brocade make more overtures to the sector with new products and services and established player Siemon launched a network management tool.

US: One of year's first big contracts was announced with a $130 million data center services deal awarded to Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) from healthcare company Allergan.

Corporate: Other news included companies opting for certifications such as LEED and some industry consolidation with Managed Data Holdings buying Data393, a Denver based data center operator.

UK: In the UK Digital Realty Trust acquired a London surburban data center and property developer Lasercharm filed a planning application with East Cambridgeshire District Council (ECDC) for a £100 million data center at the Elean Business Park in Sutton, near Ely. Europe:

In Europe, one of the key proposals of the year took a big step closer to becoming reality when on the 4th of January 2008, a working draft of the EU Code of Conduct was relased along with an invitation to comment and make suggestions on the scope of the code.

February 2008: Europe MEA: IBM and the European Union launched an initiative to look at the directions of cloud computing. The Euro17 million EU-funded initiative was called RESERVOIR (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers). Analyst group Gartner predicted that Middle East and Africa IT spending would grow at 77% per year until 2011 reaching over $250 billion.

US: HP signed a seven year $675 million outsourcing services deal with Unilever and reports said that Google spent more than $2.7 billion on data centers in 2007. The US government said it would increase its IT spend in the coming year while the US government's increased use of privately owned data centers saw an upturn in activity and operation around the Washington DC area. Healthcare company Blue Cross Blue Shield proposed a $175 million spend on a 220,000 sq ft facility in Fort Worth and Hosting.com Inc said its San Francisco data center was now carbon neutral. Monsanto said it would build a $21 million facility in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

UK: Operator BIS Ltd opened a facility in South East London and HBOS signed GDCM for a data center management deal.

Asia: Software maker SPSS was preparing to open a Singapore data center and education supplier Blackboard announced a Melbourne facility.

Corporate: In the UK Comrac and Sinetica, two of the UK's leading data center infrastructure firms, merged to form Unite Technologies and in the US, Aperture's board of directors agreed to an acquisition proposal by Emerson. Data center operator COLT was buoyed by its fourth quarter results and Iomart won its first major data center contract, with a leading telecoms supplier. APC-MGE announced the formation of APC-MGE Financial Services to provide worldwide financing and leasing capabilities to its customers.

Technology: Dell announced the expansion of the Datacenter Solutions (DCS) business unit in EMEA. Services include Reference Designs and Co-Developed Hardware, Component Optimisation, Capacity Planning for the data center and custom services. In a busy month for it, Aperture launched hand held technology for data center infrastructure measurement while Verari launched BladeRack2 and VMware announced several suites of products at its European VMworld conference.